Dissonance, Sin and Cosmic Harmony: Music in the Thirty Years' War

At the York Early Music Festival: Bettina Varwig offered an illustrated introduction to the sonic environment of Heinrich Schütz’s contemporaries as they lived through the depredations of the Thirty Years’ War. In a world in which the harmonic fabric of the world was being audibly torn asunder by humanity’s conduct, music could give heightened expression to this dissonant state of human nature while also offering glimpses of a future promise of glorious heavenly harmony.